Cubism Quotes

Seeing Cubism paintings at the Beaubourg makes me very happy and also old films.

I happen to like Precisionism. It talks to me because I collect Cubism.

Cubism is ... a picture for its own sake. Literary Cubism does the same thing in literature, using reality merely as a means and not as an end.

Modernism in a way, early modernism, for instance, in pictures, was turning against perspective and Europe. And all early modernism is actually from out of Europe, when you think of cubism is African, is looking at Africa, Matisse is looking at the arabesque, Oceania. Europe was the optical projection that had become photography, that had become film, that became television and it conquered the world.

I think cubism has not fully been developed. It is treated like a style, pigeonholed and that's it.

I think music has gone through a period of something very severe, rather radical, rather the way painting did with cubism.

Until cubism, all art, all pictures, could be 'read' by anybody. If this hadn't been so, the Christian message wouldn't have been seen by peasants and its importance would have been diminished.

Most people don't do something seminal. I've done it twice: with my tent and my bed. Picasso did it with Cubism.

If I have called Cubism a new order, it is without any revolutionary ideas or any reactionary ideas... One cannot escape from one's own epoch, however revolutionary one may be.

People want to find a 'meaning' in everything and everyone. That's the disease of our age...

Cubism is an anatomical chart of a way of seeing external objects. But I want to confuse the meaning of the act of looking.

The goal I proposed myself in making cubism? To paint and nothing more... with a method linked only to my thought... Neither the good nor the true; neither the useful nor the useless.

What greatly attracted me - and it was the main line of advance of Cubism - was how to give material expression to this new space of which I had an inkling. So I began to paint chiefly still lifes, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space... that was the earliest Cubist painting - the quest for space.

Cubism is like standing at a certain point on a mountain and looking around. If you go higher, things will look different; if you go lower, again they will look different. It is a point of view.

As we do not see squares in nature, I thought that it is man-made. But I have corrected myself. Because squares exist in salt crystals, our daily salt.

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.

Raising a child is a little like Picasso's work; in the beginning he did very conventional representational things. Cubism came after he had the rules down pat.

I was trained to look at colour, edges, to see negative space. I honestly think my greatest influence as a writer is from Cubism - the idea of a multi-faceted, multi-perspective way of looking at things.

If we had never met Picasso, would Cubism have been what it is? I think not. The meeting with Picasso was a circumstance in our lives.

The non-geometric biomorphic forms of Arp and Miro and Moore are definitely in the ascendant. The formal tradition of Gauguin, Fauvism and Expressionism will probably dominate for some time to come the tradition of Cezanne and Cubism.

Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again.

Cubism is the art of depicting new wholes with formal elements borrowed not only from the reality of vision, but from that of conception.

The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist. Why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?" -Pablo Picasso.

Cubism was an attack on the perspective that had been known and used for 500 years. It was the first big, big change. It confused people: they said, 'Things don't look like that!'

Cubism is not a reality you can take in your hand. It's more like a perfume, in front of you, behind you, to the sides, the scent is everywhere but you don’t quite know where it comes from.

Cubism is fascinating to me. I love trying to figure it out. It's just a different way of seeing... I think there are many avenues that haven't been explored yet.

City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automation, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city, it is the fullest expression of our modern age.

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

As a visual arts teacher, I have to keep my mind open. I have explores styles from pointillism to cubism.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

I don't say everything, but I paint everything.

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.

Maybe Cubism started this way. Memory re-arranging a face.

Futurism and Cubism are comparable in importance to the invention of perspective, for which they substituted a new concept of space. All subsequent movements were latent in them or brought about by them.. ..the two movements cannot be regarded as in opposition to each other, even though they started from opposite points; I maintain [an idea approved by Appolinaire and later by Matisse that they are two extremes of the same sign, tending to coincide at certain points which only the poetic instinct of the painter can discover: 'poetry' being the content and 'raison d'tre' of art.

Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Cubism came about because, in the process of analyzing form, something that lay in the form, a plane, could be lifted out to float on its own.

When we discovered cubism, we did not have the aim of discovering cubism. We only wanted to express what was in us.

Cubism is not a manner but an aesthetic, and even a state of mind; it is therefore inevitably connected with every manifestation of contemporary thought. It is possible to invent a technique or a manner independently, but one cannot invent the whole complexity of a state of mind.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

There has been 32 isms since the advent of cubism, yet after all there are essentially the same two old strings, the Romantic and the Classical. We've just be confused by the storm. Science and psychology have played a great part to say nothing of sex.

The activities of these parasites and degenerates gave rise to Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, Pointillism, Constructivism, Orphism, Surrealism, Dada, and also Impossibleism, Supersurrealism, Dynamic Double-Dog Realism, Ishkabibbleism, and Mama, which is like Dada only nicer.

No academy could have given me all I discovered by getting my teeth into the exhibitions, the shop windows, and the museums of Paris . Beginning with the market - where, for lack of money, I bought only a piece of a long cucumber - the workman in his blue overall, the most ardent followers of Cubism , everything showed a definite feeling for proportion, clarity, an accurate sense of form, of a more painterly kind of painting, even in the canvases of second-rate artists.

As a movement Cubism had consistently stopped short of complete abstraction. Heretics such as Delaunay had painted pure abstractions but in so doing had deserted Cubism.

Cubism did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries; it was not developing abstraction towards its own goal, the expression of pure reality.

Picasso and Matisse were the guys I wanted to get away from, and cubism is all still lifes. Their paintings are all closed drawings. And still life is a perfect form for that. By the mid-'50s, I sort of dropped the still life. The large picture was a way of getting around them, too. The abstract expressionists were also into the large form because it was a way of getting around Matisse and Picasso. Picasso can't paint big paintings. Matisse didn't bother after a certain point.

No high-minded painter of the last fifty years has been able to come to terms with his art without coming to terms with the problem of cubism.